Towards end-to-end management of network QoS in virtualized infrastructures

Large-scale virtualized infrastructures, such as those underlying cloud offerings, introduce novel, virtual variants of network components and links in addition to the well-known physical network elements. In these consolidated and generalised provisioning infrastructures, network QoS (quality of service) requirements apply not only to classic uplinks but also to storage and computing cluster interconnects: they determine the overall quality of the services provided. In this paper, we identify the components and connections forming end-to-end links, map them to managed components of the virtualized infrastructure and propose a strategy to realise generic end-to-end QoS coupling across arbitrary, combined virtual and physical network topologies.